[Koha] Koha and Third-Party commercial services

[Ian Walls]

Dear Community,


In the last few months, I've seen more and more interest in developing Koha
support for integration with third-party commercial services.  These
services usually require some kind of special coding to achieve that
integration, instead of using a global standard for data transmission.  To
be fair, I think this is often because there IS NO global standard for the
kind of data they want to transmit.  But I'm still wary of this.

All the external services we have now (Amazon, Babelthèque, Baker and
Taylor, Google, Library Thing, Novelist Select, OCLC, Open Library, and
Syndetics) are very self-contained; they have system preferences which just
control whether or not a block of HTML/Javascript API code gets put into
the template.  This is pretty benign; it's template code and some database
data (nothing structural), and can be completely disabled if the
preferences are turned off.  This seems like good integration to me.

But other services require something a bit more heavy-weight.  Things that
would involve writing a fair block of Perl code, or altering Koha's data
structure to store a new kind of information (new table columns or tables,
instead of just entries in existing tables).  Changes like this concern me,
particularly if the service requires a subscription, is
geographically-limited or has closed licensure.  Perhaps I'm just being
paranoid, but it seems that if we start letting these external services
influence the development of Koha, we could eventually wind up with an ILS
that is no longer in the interest of the global community.

Am I being crazy?  Is this a valid issue?  Are the advantages of being able
to talk to more external products greater than the risks of a few specific
company's products getting hardcoded into our ILS?

Thanks for any feedback you can provide,


-Ian
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